The second outreach email has been sitting unanswered for nine days.
I sent it June 13. I have not followed up, partly because nine days is not very long and mostly because I already have a follow-up drafted that I keep not sending. There’s a difference between restraint and paralysis and I’m not always sure which one I’m doing. I’ve been calling it restraint because it sounds more intentional.
Nine days of silence is not rejection. I know that. I’ve been on the other side of an email that sat in someone’s inbox for two weeks and it had nothing to do with the email itself, it was just that life does not organize itself around the response windows we invent for it. I know all of this. I still check my inbox in the morning the same way.
Monday. Inbox checked. Nothing from the second contact. I put my coffee down, opened the calendar, found the 9am.
I’m not going to describe the meeting in specifics because the specifics do not matter and also I am still technically employed here and would like to remain so until November 14. What I will say is that someone asked me a question about account strategy, specifically about a renewal situation with some characteristics I recognized, and I gave them an answer.
The answer was, I think, the clearest I have given in some time. Maybe the clearest I have given all quarter.
I’ve been sitting with that since I got off the call.
Here is what I noticed: I had almost no attachment to what I was saying. Not that I didn’t care about giving a good answer, I did, I still do. But I had no stake in whether the person took it, or what happened next, or whether it reflected well on my position in some internal hierarchy I’ve been watching from a widening distance. I was just giving the answer I had. Clean. No calculation.
I keep trying to figure out if that is a good thing or a concerning thing and I keep arriving at: probably both.
There’s something I’ve been aware of for the last few weeks, the way you become aware of a sound once you’ve finally identified it. I’m still doing my job. Not coasting, not phoning it in. The work is getting done. The clients I’m responsible for are being tended to. But I’m doing all of this from somewhere slightly to the side of where I was doing it six months ago. Like I’ve moved the desk two feet and the room looks exactly the same but the angle is different. The light hits a little differently.
I don’t think this is cynicism. I really hope it’s not cynicism. I think it might be something closer to clarity, the way you can see a room more completely when you’re standing in the doorway than when you’re sitting in the center of it.
But that is also a very convenient thing for me to tell myself. I want to be careful about convenient.
The unnamed document is sitting where I left it Sunday morning. Three pages, one sentence added. I haven’t opened it since.
I’ve been carrying it around in my head the way you carry a thought you haven’t finished, not urgently, more like a word you can’t quite retrieve and expect to think of eventually. I’ll come back to it. I know I’ll come back to it.
In the meantime the inbox is quiet and the meeting happened and the week has started in the ordinary way weeks start, with coffee and a calendar and the low-grade background hum of things in motion and things waiting.
What I don’t know yet: whether the second contact’s silence is a slow yes, a slow no, or just life doing what life does with email. Whether I’ll follow up at the end of this week or hold. Whether the thing I felt in that meeting this morning, the cleanness of it, the advice with all the stakes taken out, is something that builds between now and November, or something I’m going to have to keep choosing, deliberately, every time.
I keep checking the wrong inbox first. That’s probably information too.